Beyond Disciplinary Commodification: Infrastructure, Water Losses and the Government of the Poor in the Anthropocene

In the mid 2000s the concept of disciplinary commodification was introduced into the South African sociological lexicon to highlight the ways in which the introduction of prepaid water meters (PPWM) as technologies in the delivery of water to urban users was articulated with the imperative towards the commodification of water. The statement of this critique aligned closely with the terms of a more organically emergent social movement campaign in opposition to the introduction of PPWM in the city of Johannesburg, and which included a ‘participatory research project’ that argued that the deployment of PPWM was a stark attempt to reshape the conducts of the black poor. And for both academic and social movement critics of PPWM these devices clarified a distinctly neoliberal framework for the management and delivery of water resources. Drawing on, but also going beyond these lines of critique, this paper insists on a deeper interrogation of the nexus between the management of water infrastructures, indigent management policies and the modalities of development for governmental norms. Focusing in on this nexus, the paper shows how developing practices in the management of ‘water losses’ not only informed the adoption of new metering technologies, but also a wide range of management techniques and strategies for which the consumption of the poor was a persistent concern that interventions endeavoured to ‘fix’. These developing practices, including linked frameworks for administering to and managing township ‘indigent populations’, emerged not with the imposition of externally defined norms, but through a complex, multi-scale and ongoing ‘interplay between normalities’. More critically, such practices are shaped within this interplay by similarly emergent ideas of international best practice, the contingencies of climate crisis driven threats to water security, and crucially, wide ranging resistance to the governmental frameworks attempting to shape the water consumption of the urban poor.